The only significant overhead that TLS imposes is in the initial (public-key) handshake, and even then the overhead is primarily for high-traffic servers. Once a TLS (HTTPS) session has been established, it's essentially free to continue using it. Given that Google Analytics is basically everywhere on the web (and thus you can imagine your session would be fairly persistent as you're surfing around) and that Google can afford the server overhead of establishing TLS connections, I think your objections are unfounded.
Of course, you may still be right in that it adds no privacy, but I wouldn't call it an "incredible waste" (particularly not of bandwidth), since the cost is really quite low.
The cost is quite low for a single connection, but given that Google Analytics is on a huge portion of sites, that adds up really, really quickly. In addition, the additional roundtrips required for the TLS handshake is killer on a high-latency connection, seriously slowing things down for mobile devices.
Given that there really is no privacy benefit, I can't imagine why you would take on that overhead; Google clearly agrees, or they would've turned on HTTPS by default.
Of course, you may still be right in that it adds no privacy, but I wouldn't call it an "incredible waste" (particularly not of bandwidth), since the cost is really quite low.